Microsoft pours billions into OpenAI’s ChatGPT while google declares bot a ‘code red’

Microsoft has made a further investment into OpenAI, the creator of the column inch steeling Chatbot GPT, pouring billions of dollars into the company, according to reports.

The news comes only a few days after OpenAI announced that it would soon be offering its ChatGPT tool as an API and that it would be added to Microsoft’s Azure cloud services soon.

Microsoft has been investing in OpenAI since 2019, when the first phase of its investment programme took place, and injected a second investment in 2021. According to media reports, the latest investment is thought to total around $10 billion.

In a statement on its blog the tech giant said that the investment “extends our ongoing collaboration across AI supercomputing and research and enables each of us to independently commercialise the resulting advanced AI technologies”.

OpenAI added in its own statement: “This multi-year, multi-billion-dollar investment from Microsoft follows their previous investments in 2019 and 2021, and will allow us to continue our independent research and develop AI that is increasingly safe, useful, and powerful.”

OpenAI’s chatbot tool, ChatGPT, took the world by storm last November after its initial release, with people using it to answer intricate questions, write copywriting, and even code.

While millions are now flocking to ChatGPT to experiment with use cases, Google clearly sees the AI as a serious competitor according to the New York Times, and has (internally) declared the bot a “Code Red” and “a new way to search for information on the internet,” –  a serious match for Google.

At the same time, Microsoft is hoping to give its search engine Bing a new lease of life by implementing Chat GPT.

Microsoft also said that investment will go towards OpenAI’s research into artificial intelligence, deploying the chatbot to a wider consumer and enterprise audience and plans to introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI’s technology.

Open AI’s other products include the image-generator DALL-E, the computer programming assistant Codex and the speech recognition tool Whisper.